Movie Review: The Girl in the Spider's Web

To say The Girl in the Spider's Web is related to the same book written by David Lagercrantz as a continuation of Stieg Larsson's trilogy Millennium series would be a stretch. Sure writer/director Fede Alvarez used characters from the fourth book and referenced the initial trilogy but the plotline is only very loosely based on what the book is about. Additional screenwriting by Jay Basu and Steven Knight rounded out all the writers who would eventually have a hand in bringing the story to the screen. It didn't help.

David Lagercrantz has written two books featuring characters from the original Stieg Larsson trilogy. They are NOT Stieg Larsson but were sufficiently well thought out thrillers that delved more into the history of the girl Lisbeth Salander and her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomquist. They were worthy successors in the absence of the now diseased Larsson (although it might have been interesting to see what this unpublished fourth manuscript that he wrote).

The original trilogy had been adapted by Sweden for a feature film/television broadcast and was wonderfully cast and adapted for the screen. Likewise, an American adaption by David Fincher was extremely well done and made the top 10 lists for film the year it came out. Both Sweden and the U.S. had a box office hit. The lack of any U.S. follow-up has been confounding but it may have been about not being able to get the whole cast back together at the same time for sequels. Daniel Craig, for one, had James Bond commitments that would have been harder to work around.

Rooney Mara who had played Lisbeth Salander in the American feature was ready to go again but ultimately the decision was to go with a younger cast and skip book two and three and go with a soft re-boot of the series using David Lagerantz's book The Girl in the Spider's Web. Initial casting on the award-winning Claire Foy of Netflix's The Crown seemed promising. The rest of the cast seemed capable, quite young and altogether too pretty. Even Plague was more adorable than anyone might have expected if they knew the books.

The big failure wasn't the casting though it was the writing that went off book in more ways that one. They essentially created an entirely new storyline that can only be loosely connected to Lagerantz's book or the trilogy. It seems the script is built on set action pieces that don't appear in the book and it comes at the expense of any character building. Almost all of the characters are cardboard cut-outs. There is zero chemistry between any of them!

I think a key mistake is for Lisbeth Salander's memory of her sister coming back in snippets. This is what Mikael Bloomquist's quest is. It is also in keeping with his investigative journalist profession. Salander is a cipher because any time she has tried to tell her story, it has hurt her. We get to know her by her actions. Through Blomquist's investigation of her actions, we get her back story.

The Girl in the Spider's Web was the biggest box office failure the series has ever seen. I won't go on anymore about its failures. Suffice to say that I hope that the Swedes do a version that does it justice.